A Collection of Greek Ritual Norms (2013-today)

The Collection of Greek Ritual Norms is a digital database (http://cgrn.ulg.ac.be), constructed at the Université de Liège by Jan-Mathieu Carbon and Saskia Peels, under the project direction of Prof. dr. V. Pirenne-Delforge, which gathers together a selection of 225 Greek inscriptions which are usually called “sacred laws” in current scholarship. This misleading rubric is in fact comprised of a wide variety of epigraphic documents, including decrees, calendars, boundary stones, etc, from all across the ancient Greek world. The database focusses on two themes which much of this documentation shares—sacrifice and purification—and offers rather a selection of representative inscriptions.
The CGRN is a practical website on which these collected inscriptions are republished. We have encoded texts using the current Epidoc XML standards. Our target audience consists of scholars of Greek and other ancient religions, as well as classicists more generally, rather than epigraphers per se. Therefore, we have chosen to privilege certain aspects of the edition of the inscriptions over others. We provide essential but brief description of the monuments; standard versions of the inscribed texts, or new ones with minimal restorations; lucid translations in both English and French; helpful but succinct bibliography and commentary.
The database can be searched on the basis of Greek and/or English text, location, data and particular themes.
Concerning the themes, a main the Project has been to obtain a clearer insight into the vocabulary of sacrifice and purification. Beyond the standard lemmatisation of lexical forms we have accordingly opted to maximise searchability of the collection by tagging thematic groups of words and phrases For example, in sacrificial regulations, we encode lemmata indicating people on whose behalf the sacrifice is carried out (“groups” such as demes or gênê), as well as the cult “personnel” which performs it; the sacrificial “animal” (including for example its “gender”, and “age”); words and phrases denoting the act of “sacrifice”; and other key concepts such as the relevant “deity”. More generally, “structures” (such as temples or altars), “localities” (such as an agora or acropolis) and “authority” statements (κατὰ τὰ πάτρια, νόμος) are tagged. Users will be able to automatically search for these themes, and to see a list of all instances of a particular theme in the corpus.
We are currently finalising the book publication of the CGRN and envisaging next steps for enlarging the database.